Coronavirus Live Updates: 3 Top U.S. Health Officials Go Into Quarantine


Coronavirus Live Updates: 3 Top U.S. Health Officials Go Into Quarantine

Top U.S. health officials go into quarantine after White House staff members tested positive.

In the latest sign of worry that the coronavirus could be spreading through the senior ranks of the Trump administration, three top public health officials have begun partial or full self-quarantine for two weeks after coming into contact with someone who has tested positive.

Representatives for Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, confirmed the precautions on Saturday.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confirmed a CNN report that he had begun a “modified quarantine” after what he called a “low risk” contact.

The actions came as the Food and Drug Administration has approved the first antigen test that can rapidly detect whether a person has been infected — a development that promises to expand the nation’s testing capacity.

Unlike commonly available coronavirus tests that use polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., antigen diagnostics work by quickly detecting fragments of the virus in a sample. The tests can provide results “in minutes,” the F.D.A. said, adding that it expected to grant emergency clearance for more antigen tests in the near future.

Now, with the coronavirus set to pose a continued public health risk over the coming months, Democrats are working to export their template for success — intense digital outreach and a coordinated vote-by-mail operation — to other states in the hope that it will improve the party’s chances in local and statewide elections and in the quest to unseat President Trump in November.

“Every American should be able to vote by mail, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

And as the first test of whether Wisconsin Democrats’ April 7 methods can be repeated comes on Tuesday, in a special House election, officials say the contest is less about which candidate wins than it is an exercise in training volunteers and voters in how to vote by mail.

When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?

According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.

“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.

In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease.

Endings “are very, very messy,” said Dora Vargha, a historian at the University of Exeter. “Looking back, we have a weak narrative. For whom does the epidemic end, and who gets to say?”

With the U.S. economy in crisis, the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spread across the country and the search for a vaccine continuing, top economic officials, governors and pharmaceutical executives are set to appear on the Sunday news shows.

On April 10, Tony Thompson, the sheriff for Black Hawk County in Iowa, visited the giant Tyson Foods pork plant in Waterloo. What he saw, he said, “shook me to the core.”

Workers, many of them immigrants, were crowded elbow to elbow as they broke down hog carcasses zipping by on a conveyor belt. The few who had face coverings wore a motley assortment of bandannas, painters’ masks or even sleep masks stretched around their mouths. Some had masks hanging around their necks.

But the plant — Tyson’s largest pork operation in the United States, responsible for almost 4 percent of the nation’s pork supply — didn’t stay closed for long.

As meat shortages hit U.S. grocery stores and fast-food restaurants, political pressure built to reopen plants that had shut down because of virus outbreaks. After an executive order by President Trump declared the meat supply “critical infrastructure” and shielded the companies from certain liability.

New safety precautions have been added at the Tyson plant, and now the question is: Will America’s appetite for meat be sated without sickening armies of low-wage workers, and their communities, in new waves of infection?

Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago and its closest suburbs, has added more cases of the coronavirus than any other county in the United States on some recent days. On Friday, it added more new cases than New York City’s five boroughs combined.

“Watching a city of such global importance go through this absolutely horrific experience is so incredibly sad to see, but also of course a cautionary tale for the rest of us,” Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, said of New York City.

She said she had conferred with mayors in many of the country’s largest cities in recent weeks. “All of us have to be prepared,” she said, “and thinking about, ‘How do we not become the next hot spot?’”

As a college semester like no other winds down, with bedrooms replacing classrooms as testing sites, professors are no longer able to keep a close eye out for cheat sheets and wandering eyes.

Into the havoc have come digital proctoring services, which, after years in tech’s niches, are suddenly monitoring hundreds of thousands of students taking millions of at-home exams in myriad time zones.

Privacy advocates are sounding alarms. Investors are taking note. And students are fueling demand with their own testing — of boundaries.

“There has to be a better way,” said Sue Escobar, a professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento. She said she would not use a webcam option that the university added last month to its online testing software, a step that she called “invasive.”

“Sure, we want to minimize cheating,” she said, “but how far do you go?”

Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive, clashed with health officials in California on Saturday over the reopening of the company’s factory in Fremont, with Mr. Musk pushing for an immediate return and the county’s government seeking a delay of about a week.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Musk said he would move the company’s headquarters out of California to Texas or Nevada. Tesla also took its fight to federal court, filing a lawsuit against Alameda County on Saturday. The company said “the county’s position left us no choice but to take legal action to ensure that Tesla and its employees can get back to work.”

The actions came a day after county health officials told Tesla that it was not yet allowed to resume production of electric vehicles in Fremont because of fears that the coronavirus could spread among the company’s workers. Manufacturers have been allowed to restart work in other parts of the state that have had less severe outbreaks.

“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will depend on how Tesla is treated in the future.”

The factors that made New York City the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic — its density, tourism and dependence on mass transit — complicate a return to any semblance of normalcy.

The key to reopening is containing the virus, and that will take a vast infrastructure of testing and contact tracing unlike anything the United States has ever seen, public health experts say.

How long might it take to restart New York City’s economy?

Said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last week: “Nobody can tell you.”

The call in early February from the White House Situation Room came as a surprise to Rick Bright: Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, wanted him to come present his ideas for fighting the coronavirus, alone.

Dr. Bright, whose tiny federal research agency was pursuing a coronavirus vaccine, had long been at odds with his boss at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Kadlec. And his White House visits, twice in a single weekend, exacerbated those tensions. “Weekend at Peter’s,” Dr. Kadlec quipped in the subject line of an email that expressed his displeasure.

The hostility between these two key officials in the government’s response to a pandemic that has claimed more than 75,000 American lives burst into public view last week when Dr. Bright — who was dismissed last month as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — filed a formal whistle-blower complaint.

The document accuses Dr. Kadlec and other top administration officials of “cronyism” and putting politics ahead of science.

Robert M. Edsel, founder and chairman of the Monuments Men Foundation, said the cause was complications of the coronavirus.

During the war, a small, special force of American and British art historians, museum directors, curators and others started out steering Allied bombers away from cultural targets in Europe and overseeing temporary repairs when damage occurred. Their numbers grew, and after the war they tracked down more than five million objects stolen by Nazi Germany and returned them to the countries from which they came.

In the Pacific theater, their mission was chiefly to assess damage to cultural treasures, prevent looting and return stolen objects. In the course of their work they came across many works of art that no one from the West had ever seen.

This required a tremendous amount of inventorying and record keeping, which was where Ms. Huthwaite came in.

Getting the whole family to move more.

It’s easy to be stationary when there’s nowhere to go, and children tend not to respond well to formal workouts. Here are some ideas to help the whole family — from the youngest to the oldest — get up and move a bit more, without it feeling like work.

Reporting was contributed by Neal E. Boudette, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Michael Corkery, Michael Crowley, Reid J. Epstein, Tess Felder, Emily Flitter, J. David Goodman, Shawn Hubler, Gina Kolata, Sharon LaFraniere, Michael Levenson, Ben Protess, Michael Rothfeld, Michael D. Shear, Mitch Smith, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Ana Swanson and David Yaffe-Bellany.




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